I knew a manager that tried the exact same but in the GPT4 era :D He also got fired/left but as satisfying it would be to say that this was the cause of his demise I can't prove that.
I really wish apps stopped doing that "search on type" thing in search boxes. You either need to have only a couple miliseconds of response time, or you need to confirm that you want the search process to start. Or maybe at least have some feedback showing "more content is loading, watch out, don't click".
The amount of misclicks daily because of crappy slow-but-should-be-fast search probably offsets by 10x the amount of time required to hit "enter" for the search to start.
I'm seeing another team doing this, with 99% agents, and quality, predictability of delivery and raw performance have taken a massive nosedive.
But even not caring about quality: Speed of development is abysmal. It was never something this team had anyway, they were always slow. So they don't care that they take a year and 20 people to do what another startup in the same space was able to deliver in a few months with a skeleton crew (and perhaps more quality).
To me the experiment has shown the results it should. It's self-serving to developers, and amplifies the good and the bad in them. It's not particularly good to users and not to companies if the developers aren't good themselves.
After seeing a crazy amount of non-programmers, sometimes with 10 years of experience, basically turning off their brains and offloading most their thinking to some LLM and turning their days into "please check this product and tell me what I should do next", I don't see why not.
I've seen: designers, performance marketers, data scientists, SEO experts, product managers, engineering managers, CRM expert, all using it for pretty much every single individual part of their job. I don't have to even mention programmers, of course.
Once in a while the most egregious ones get caught. I've seen so far a product manager, three data scientists, a CRM person and several developers getting fired for doing absolutely nothing but showing up, firing Claude with a few integrations to a dozen tools and prompting "do the work".
Might sound harsh, but after the last few years, I really don't see why an LLM wouldn't do a better job by itself compared to 80% of employees of tech companies, honestly.
One of the biggest traps LLMs enable is the fantasy of getting away with it. Tools that make you feel like you can get away with it bring out the worst in people. It's not a reflection of the technology but of the people.
Every time we see another AI agent "gone rogue", every time we see more LLM slop turning up by e-mail, comments, blog articles, people did that. Not AI -- people feel like they can get away with it. People are setting the machines out to do these things. We should be addressing the people, not the machines. The machines are the symptom.
Every time people manage to get away with something, it's insane, it's addictive. It's all over once you get caught, but until then, maybe forever, LLMs can feel like a cheat code...
To answer the sibling that is flagged. I vouched but it’s still grey.
These people were fired because their work was considered shit by their managers and produced no results. They were replaced by nobody. They were dead weight pretending to work.
EDIT: I think this sounds quite similar to tales of developers and Excel wizards automating their jobs in secret and producing the same results. This was not the case here, as the results were considered low quality.
This is absolutely true, but even the most charitable interpretation of “maximize the use of AI” doesn’t include “do nothing but prompt and you’ll keep your job”.
One can argue semantics and fairness all day long, but if an employee is adding no value to their $90 Claude signature, then they’re gonna get fired as soon as someone realizes. :/
I have the same experience in one of our properties.
We have someone who's checking daily what's there, and they need to vet ads constantly.
It's a lot of anti-fungus advertisement (which made us block health products in general), but also a lot of fake software. Unfortunately we can't afford to block the entire software category.
I remember transparency was handled with gifs back then, which had their own problems and limitations.
Alignment was either done via position: absolute or by using a table. The animated background here would be a bit more complicated with a table.
Risk of it breaking with some upgrade, or looking different for some people? As you said, very likely.
So server-side image generation was indeed the best option. And it was a popular and widely solved problem, even in the 90s: visit counters that showed the visits in the shape of an image were super popular.
Yes, you could have done similar with GIFs already with Netscape 3 and IE 3 (I think, IE 3.1, or was this just the Mac version?). "Dynamic HTML" with z-layering became a thing with Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0, which became available in Summer/Fall 1997. With this, relative positioning and proportional text (at variable character width) wouldn't have been a problem.
(With the NS/IE 3 generation, you would have been limited to lines of prepositioned fixed-width characters in a table. So, not really applicable for this.)
I think, the decisive factor may have been badly managed CRTs tending to display greys with a somewhat reddish hue (esp. on Windows, not so much on Macs with a screen gamma of 1.8) and JPEGs generally enjoying better color support.
(JPEG was displayed at sRGB or at any embedded IEC profile, which wasn't available for GIF, where the effective color was pretty much hit and miss. So, if you had HTML text with a defined hex-color, a GIF of the same color wouldn't match, while a sRGB JPEG would. Matching JPEG and GIF colors would have posed a similar problem. A reddish hue on grey looked kind of cheap and brownish text was probably the last thing Apple would have wanted.)
Yeah, transparency on gifs is binary, so you always had a crunchy edge. Plenty of use cases, but nice looking text wasn't one of them.
And position: absolute did not behave the same way across IE, NN, FF, or safari.
For some reason I feel the sudden urge to have a drink.
Just don't tell the kids about how eCommerce used to work. Credit card number in an email, courtesy of Mal's eCommerce? Pretty much industry standard. shudders, swigs
100% this. Pirating in Germany is probably the stupidest thing one can do, because enforcement is done by individual lawyers via a process called Abmahnung. Courts (and therefore providers) are very friendly to those. Everyone knows someone who got "the letter".
He got fired quite quickly after his boss realized it was all bullshit.
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